Donald Trump arrived in Washington in January 2017 with something unusual for a newly elected president.
He had an enormous political movement.
He had millions of intensely loyal voters.
He had defeated both the Democratic Party and much of the Republican establishment.
What he did not have was a political institution built over decades around Donald Trump.
There was no Trump version of Heritage.
No Trump version of the Federalist Society.
No Trump network of state think tanks.
No Trump school for training government personnel.
No large pool of lawyers who had spent twenty years developing a distinctly Trump-centered body of constitutional law.
He had a campaign.
He had a family business.
He had political instincts.
He had loyal advisers.
And he had won.
But now he had to run the federal government.
That is where the machine waiting outside government became extremely useful.
Heritage had people ready
The Evidence → Heritage staff in the Trump transition and administration
Heritage's own 2017 annual report describes what happened with unusual clarity.
Heritage's own 2017 report says roughly 70 former employees worked on Trump's transition team or in his administration.
They went into the White House.
The Department of Homeland Security.
Health and Human Services.
The Environmental Protection Agency.
The Defense Department.
The National Security Council.
The Office of Management and Budget.
Among them was Russ Vought, who left Heritage Action to become deputy director of OMB.
Heritage celebrated this.
Its annual report used one of founder Ed Feulner's favorite phrases:
People are policy.
That sentence may be one of the simplest explanations for why personnel has mattered so much throughout this story.
A policy paper sitting on a shelf doesn't change government.
Someone inside government has to understand it.
Believe in it.
Know where authority exists.
Know which regulation has to change.
Know which office controls the budget.
Know which lawyer has to approve it.
Heritage had spent decades building relationships with exactly those kinds of people.
Trump hadn't.
But he could use them.
Heritage had policy ready too
The Evidence → Heritage’s own account of its 2016 policy recommendations
The same thing happened with policy.
Heritage had prepared its 2016 Mandate for Leadership series before Trump took office.
After Trump's first year, Heritage announced that its own analysis found 64 percent of its recommendations had either been implemented, included in Trump's budget or were under consideration.
That number should be treated for what it is: Heritage measuring its own influence, not an independent audit.
But it tells us something important about how Heritage itself understood the relationship.
The organization believed that years of outside policy work were now moving into government.
This was the Reagan model again.
Do the work before the election.
Then use the opening when it comes.
The courts may be the cleanest example
The Evidence → Trump’s judicial list and the Federalist Society’s stated role
Trump entered the 2016 campaign facing a problem with conservative voters.
Many did not trust him.
He had changed positions on major issues.
He had donated to Democrats.
He had no long record inside the conservative legal movement.
One way he reassured skeptical conservatives was unusual for a presidential campaign.
He published a list of people he might nominate to the Supreme Court.
The names came out of an existing conservative legal world.
Leonard Leo, then a senior Federalist Society leader, played an important role in suggesting candidates, along with future White House counsel Don McGahn and Heritage.
Leo later took leave from the Federalist Society to help with the confirmation processes for Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
Again, the evidence boundary matters.
The Federalist Society as an organization says it does not select or endorse judicial nominees.
But by 2017, it didn't have to.
The network had existed for thirty-five years.
Conservative judges, lawyers, professors and government attorneys already knew one another.
Trump could draw from a legal talent pool that had been cultivated long before he entered politics.
The result was not simply:
Trump chose conservative judges.
It was:
Trump gained access to a mature conservative legal network capable of identifying, evaluating and supporting judicial candidates almost immediately.
That is what decades of institution-building looks like when an election finally creates an opening.
But not everyone entering the White House came from that older machine
The Evidence → Miller, Sessions and Breitbart
This is where the story gets more interesting.
Trump brought another political stream with him.
One of its most important figures was Stephen Miller.
Miller did not come to Trump through Heritage.
He came through Jeff Sessions.
Miller had worked for Sessions in the Senate beginning in 2009.
During the 2013 immigration fight, he helped Sessions oppose the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” immigration bill and became closely associated with a much more restrictive approach to both illegal and legal immigration.
Sessions and his advisers began consulting with Trump on immigration before the 2016 campaign was fully underway.
In January 2016, Miller left Sessions' office to become a senior policy adviser to Trump.
Miller also had close relationships with the conservative media world around Breitbart.
Before joining Trump, he communicated with Breitbart editors about immigration and political messaging. After the election, former Breitbart chairman Steve Bannon became Trump's chief strategist while Miller became senior adviser for policy.
So another lane enters our story:
Sessions
→ immigration restriction movement
→ Miller
→ Breitbart/Bannon political-media world
→ Trump.
That lane overlapped with the older conservative movement.
But it wasn't the same thing.
The two movements wanted some of the same things—and not others
Traditional movement conservatives had spent decades emphasizing:
smaller government,
lower taxes,
deregulation,
social conservatism,
strong national defense,
and conservative judges.
Trump embraced many of those things.
But he brought other priorities that did not fit neatly into the older conservative program.
Trade protectionism.
Deep skepticism about traditional alliances.
A more nationalist economic message.
A willingness to attack Republican institutions and leaders personally.
And an immigration agenda more restrictive than many business-oriented Republicans had historically supported.
This wasn't simply Heritage taking over Trump.
And it wasn't Trump destroying the older conservative movement.
It was a negotiation.
Sometimes an alliance.
Sometimes a fight.
Sometimes both at once.
The first big fight showed how uneasy the relationship still was
The Evidence → The 2017 health-care bill fight
Republicans entered 2017 controlling the presidency, House and Senate.
One of their oldest promises was repealing the Affordable Care Act.
That should have been straightforward.
It wasn't.
Trump initially supported the House Republican leadership's replacement bill.
The House Freedom Caucus opposed it because members believed it did not repeal enough of Obamacare.
Trump became furious.
He publicly attacked Freedom Caucus members and threatened to support primary challengers against them.
The group that had grown out of the Tea Party insurgency was now openly defying a Republican president elected with an enormous conservative following.
That matters.
If Trump had simply taken control of the preexisting conservative machine, this should not have happened.
The old insurgency still had its own power.
Eventually the White House and Freedom Caucus negotiated changes and the House passed a replacement bill, though the effort ultimately died in the Senate.
But something had changed.
Trump and the congressional insurgents had learned that they needed each other.
Mick Mulvaney crosses the boundary first
One of the Freedom Caucus founders had already moved inside the administration.
Mick Mulvaney became Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget.
OMB is not one of the most famous government agencies.
But it is one of the most powerful.
It reviews agency budgets.
It reviews important regulations.
It helps coordinate presidential priorities throughout the executive branch.
A person who understands OMB can influence government far beyond the office itself.
The Tea Party congressman who had spent years fighting government spending was now sitting inside the institution responsible for managing the president's budget.
Then, in late 2018, Trump made Mulvaney his acting White House chief of staff.
That is an extraordinary institutional progression:
Tea Party congressman
→ Freedom Caucus founder
→ OMB
→ White House chief of staff.
The insurgency had moved very far inside.
Russ Vought follows him
The Evidence → Vought’s White House biography
Then came Russ Vought.
Vought's path may be even more important for the rest of this story.
Before the Trump administration, he had worked:
on Capitol Hill,
at the Republican Study Committee,
and for seven years as a vice president at Heritage Action.
Then he entered OMB.
He became deputy director.
Then acting director.
Then, in July 2020, confirmed director.
The Trump White House described his job as overseeing implementation of the president's policy, management and regulatory agendas across the executive branch.
Think about the movement we've been following.
Heritage writes policy outside government.
Heritage Action pressures lawmakers outside government.
Vought works for Heritage Action.
Then Vought enters one of the most powerful coordinating offices inside the federal government.
The outside-pressure operation has now produced someone responsible for helping run the executive branch itself.
That matters later.
A lot.
Mark Meadows makes the same journey
While Vought was rising at OMB, Trump's relationship with Mark Meadows was becoming increasingly close.
Meadows had gone from Tea Party congressman to Freedom Caucus founder to caucus chairman.
During Trump's first years in office, Meadows became one of his most reliable defenders in Congress.
By March 2020, Trump made Meadows White House chief of staff.
So now look at the sequence:
Mick Mulvaney
Freedom Caucus founder
→ OMB
→ chief of staff.
Then:
Mark Meadows
Freedom Caucus founder/chairman
→ chief of staff.
The congressional movement that had begun by fighting Republican leadership now had two of its leading figures move through the top levels of a Republican White House.
That isn't merely ideological influence.
That is a personnel pipeline.
Stephen Miller's influence grew at the same time
The Evidence → Reporting on Miller’s role
Miller survived something many Trump advisers did not.
Turnover.
Bannon left.
Reince Priebus left.
John Kelly came and went.
Cabinet secretaries changed.
Senior aides disappeared.
Miller stayed.
His focus was immigration.
Reporting from inside the administration repeatedly identified him as one of the central drivers of Trump's restrictive immigration agenda.
He worked on the first travel-ban executive order.
He pushed reductions in refugee admissions.
He advocated tighter asylum rules and reductions in legal immigration.
He remained deeply involved in immigration policy even after Bannon departed the White House.
This is important because Miller's lane is becoming institutional too.
It had begun with Sessions.
It intersected with Breitbart.
Now it had direct power inside the White House.
And eventually Miller would take what he had learned there and build an outside legal organization of his own.
But that comes later.
The White House was becoming a meeting point
By 2019–2020, several political traditions we have been following separately were now operating inside the same administration.
The Heritage/Federalist Society world supplied policy people and lawyers.
The Tea Party/Freedom Caucus world supplied Mulvaney, Meadows and congressional allies.
The Sessions/Miller immigration world supplied a nationalist immigration agenda.
Trump himself supplied:
the presidency,
the voters,
the political brand,
and an increasingly personal definition of political loyalty.
Those pieces fit together often enough to govern.
But they were not identical.
That's important.
Because something was about to be added that changed the personnel question.
Trump becomes increasingly focused on loyalty
The Evidence → Reporting on McEntee’s personnel operation
By 2020, Trump had been impeached once.
He believed parts of his own administration had resisted him.
He had repeatedly complained about leaks and officials who disagreed with his decisions.
He wanted people he trusted.
Into that environment came John McEntee.
McEntee had been a young Trump aide during the campaign and early White House.
In early 2020, Trump put him in charge of the White House Presidential Personnel Office.
That office helps control thousands of political appointments across the executive branch.
McEntee's operation began examining whether political appointees were sufficiently loyal to Trump and his agenda.
Reporting from the period described officials being asked to identify people who were supportive of the president and those considered disloyal.
That introduced something slightly different from the older conservative personnel project.
For decades, movement institutions had asked:
Who is a reliable conservative?
Increasingly, Trump's personnel operation was asking another question:
Who is reliable to Trump?
Those categories could overlap.
But they were not the same.
And that tension—ideological loyalty versus personal/political loyalty—would become one of the central problems the movement tried to solve after 2020.
Then came Schedule F
The Evidence → Schedule F order and GAO review
On October 21, 2020, less than two weeks before the election, Trump signed an executive order that received far less public attention than almost everything else happening that fall.
It created a new category of federal employment called Schedule F.
The order applied to certain career government employees in policy-related positions.
Employees moved into the category would lose many of the normal civil-service protections against removal.
The theory was straightforward.
The president should have greater ability to remove career employees who significantly influence policy but are unwilling to carry out presidential priorities.
Trump's order said greater accountability was necessary for positions that had a meaningful role in shaping policy.
This was not a mass firing order by itself.
Agencies first had to identify which jobs would move into the category.
But one office moved aggressively.
Russ Vought's OMB.
OMB proposed 140 positions for Schedule F, and OPM approved 136.
No agencies had moved positions into Schedule F before Trump lost the election.
President Biden revoked the order on January 22, 2021.
For the moment, Schedule F appeared to be over.
It wasn't.
This is where the first administration teaches the movement something new
The conservative movement had spent decades trying to solve the problem of personnel.
Train people.
Build networks.
Keep résumés.
Find conservative lawyers.
Prepare appointees.
Trump's first term exposed a different problem.
You could fill the top political jobs.
But beneath them sat a massive permanent federal workforce.
Career employees had legal protections.
Agencies had their own cultures.
Rules took time to change.
Courts could block executive actions.
Congress controlled money.
A president could issue an order and discover that implementation was much harder than announcing it.
People inside the Trump administration began asking a different question:
How much power does the president actually have over the government he was elected to run?
That question would eventually become central to Russ Vought.
To Project 2025.
To personnel planning.
To the second Trump administration.
But in 2020, they were learning it in real time.
Heritage was still there
The Evidence → Heritage delivers its 2020 Mandate to Meadows
One more detail shows how continuous this relationship had become.
In 2020, Heritage released yet another Mandate for Leadership.
Heritage vice president Thomas Binion personally delivered a copy to Mark Meadows, now Trump's White House chief of staff.
Meadows said he would give it to Trump and suggested it could serve as a blueprint for a second term.
There is something almost symmetrical about that.
In 1981, Heritage had sent a Mandate for Leadership into the Reagan administration.
Nearly forty years later, another Heritage Mandate was being handed to a White House chief of staff who had begun his national rise inside the Tea Party/Freedom Caucus insurgency.
The institution had outlived Reagan.
It had outlived the first Bush.
Clinton.
George W. Bush.
Obama.
And now it was supplying policy to Trump.
Institutions remember.
But Trump changed the institutions too
This part is just as important.
The influence did not run in only one direction.
Trump changed the conservative movement.
Organizations that had once emphasized free trade became more willing to accept protectionism.
Immigration restriction became much more central.
Political confrontation became more personal.
Arguments about the administrative state increasingly mixed traditional conservative skepticism of bureaucracy with Trump's belief that career officials were obstructing him personally.
And loyalty to Trump became an important dividing line inside Republican politics.
Some conservatives left.
Others resisted.
Others adapted.
Some institutions moved closer to Trump.
Some tried to maintain distance.
Some people concluded that the next conservative administration needed to be far better prepared than the first.
That conclusion is where the story is headed.
Then came the 2020 election
Trump lost.
Joe Biden won.
And suddenly all the people who had spent four years learning how the federal government actually worked faced a familiar situation.
They were about to be outside government again.
But this wasn't 1964.
It wasn't 1992.
It wasn't 2008.
They weren't leaving government with only political ideas.
They were leaving with experience.
Russ Vought knew OMB from the inside.
Stephen Miller knew how immigration policy moved through the White House and agencies.
Mark Meadows had run the White House staff.
John McEntee had run presidential personnel.
Former agency officials understood exactly where bureaucratic resistance had slowed or changed policy.
Lawyers knew which executive actions had survived court challenges and which ones had failed.
And then something else happened.
Trump refused to accept the election result.
The fight over the 2020 election would bring Mark Meadows, Cleta Mitchell, John Eastman and a new election-law network into the center of the story.
January 6 would rupture American politics.
Some Republicans would break with Trump.
Others would remain.
But the part of the network we've been following did something we've seen before.
It didn't disappear because it had lost an election.
It went back outside government.
And started building.
This time, the people doing the building knew exactly what government looked like from the inside.
That makes what happened next different from every earlier chapter.
They weren't preparing for a government they imagined.
They were preparing for a government they had already run.